When evaluating location of a park, which of the area stats. do you give more preference to?
I understand that when it comes to area population metrics - it’s important to look at the “metro area” as a whole.

However, when looking at things like unemployment, vacancy - you probably want to concentrate on the town numbers instead. Would you go as far as checking a zip code statistics? As in some larger areas zip code statistics could vary greatly from those of the city itself.

Best Places is great, but I also use https://populationexplorer.com/ to do more of a deep dive into the area I’m looking at. The website is a little clunky and takes some getting used to. But it is fairly robust for a free site.